Improvised Events in the Museum

Irena Bekić

The project is realized as a visual, dance, instrumental and vocal interaction of four authors

Andreje Kulunčić [visual artist], Zrinke Užbinec [dance artist and choreographer], Jasne Jovićević [saxophonist and composer] and Annette Giesriegl [vocalist].

Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Baunet café and other museum premises, September 14 and 16, 2019.

It is a site specific performance designed for the Museum of Contemporary Art, that is, for its central vertical space the Baunet Café, the architecture of which links the storeys and spaces of the museum. But since this space has never really been operationalised, the linkage with and interference of the spaces of the museum has remained at the level of idea and notion. The performance Improvised Events and the exhibition that has been produced as a result of it endeavour to react precisely to this spatial and atmospheric vacuity of the museum. The four artists, using their own individual media – video, sound, voice and movement and in interaction with the audience activate the architecture and set-up of the museum, that is, mobilise the fundamental components of the museum structure: artists, work, public, collection, space and architecture.

The basic structure of the work is set up and agreed on beforehand, the performers improvise on it in a dialogue with each other, in a dialogue with the space and in a dialogue with the visitors. There are four stations, each consisting of a looper, a microphone and a speaker, on which during the performance the vocalist and the instrumentalist change places in recording loops to be heard during the performance and to which they and the dancer react with improvisations. The performance starts in the foyer of the museum with a bass clarinet solo that sets up a minimalist foundation on which the following musical performance subsequently draws. During this time, in the outer part of the museum, apart from the audience and the music being played, the dancer fills the space with her body in a solo performance. After that come a series of performances that are constructed spatially and end with a section on the roof of the museum. During the performance an instantly created composition is built up. At the end it is connected up, and when it passes on its return through the same space, the audience becomes aware that the composition that they have heard, together with traces of the performance that it sees, is a kind of acoustic sculpture, a work that created in its previous passing though the museum, in the interaction of the performers – sound, image, voice, movement — and the audience.

Within the dance part of the project, the body has got its own line in which it creates awareness of sensations, the invisible structures of the space, sounds, the dynamics of movement of the audience. The dance imaginarily fills up the voids, building an invisible network.

Along with sound and movement, video is the third component of the structure. If sound and movement, provisionally put, fill up the space, video is the element of time. The videos, that is, offer the public an analytical view of the work and an insight into the parts of the project that cannot be followed all at the same time because of the constant alternation of positions.

At the end, the role of the public should not be neglected. On the one hand, sharing the space with the performers, the public has an active part in the construction of the installation. On the other, with the choice of its positions, movement, or by focusing on one of the simultaneous segments, the public manages its own perception. In addition, some of the people from the public are invited to follow a different performance route with the task of observing the behaviour, retaining the attention and movement of the audience during the performance. Half way through they move away from the rest of the audience, come into the space of the permanent display divided from the area of the Baunet Café by glass panels. From there they observe the further course of the performance, but do not hear anything, their attention being transferred to the behaviour of the public. With glass marker pens they draw the movements of the audience, the density of its lingering at a given spot, the focus of attention or write words that describe these things. The performers on the other hand use these notes as choreographic instructions and graphic notations for further actions. In this sense, then, this part is the climax in which all become both performers and audience and in which the spatial lines of force of the museum are collected.

At the end, it is worth emphasising that the live performance and improvisation do not relate to form but to strategy; this is not a presentation that is happening before an audience, rather, all together are drawn into the process of the work’s coming into being, which provokes the whole experience of partaking, blurring the distinction between performer and viewer and querying the individual spaces of activity.